“Old Friends”

90

Pinegrove’s 2015 compilation Everything So Far began with Evan Hall singing, “I resolve to make new friends/I like my old ones but I fucked up so I’ll start again.” It was boisterous and optimistic and rightfully so; making new friends in one’s twenties can be simply a matter of resolve. But it gets harder with every year into adulthood, and this past February, theBritish Journal of Psychology and Pinegrove’s “Old Friends” came to the same conclusion as to why that is: Intelligent people become too goal-oriented and less vulnerable or, as Hall puts it, “Too caught up in my own shit/That’s how every outcome’s such a comedown.”

“Old Friends” finds Hall in one of his solipsistic moods, making hyper-detailed observations of his surroundings yet feeling disconnected from the people closest to him. “I should call my parents when I think of them/Should tell my friends when I love them,” he sighs, the should making it unclear whether he’s had an epiphany or just another clever thought that will come and go like a joke about the Port Authority. Even as the economic and romantic anxieties of millennials continue to be exhaustively documented, “Old Friends” feels like a fresh take—maybe making new friends isn't as important as keeping the old ones. –Ian Cohen

“On the Lips”

89

Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos, has a gift for songs that are demonstrably grounded in real life, with arrangements anyone could play, but which still seem like miniature epiphanies. Next Thinghighlight “On the Lips” has all the trappings of quintessential indie-pop: keenly observational lyrics, sprightly guitar strums, and a wistful chorus about a kiss that never happens. But Kline packs so much into the track’s sub-two-minutes:musings about watching David Blaine, a curious lyrical aside that gave the title to Cosmos’s 2013 effort im sorry im hi lets go (where “On the Lips” originally appeared, in rougher form), and an existential question that never gets answered. It’s a song less about kissing than about believing, even at the risk of looking foolish. “I don’t want magic that looks real,” Blaine himself once said. “What I want are real things that feel like magic.” That’s an apt description of what Kline accomplishes here. –Marc Hogan

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Roc Nation/Westbury Road

Rihanna

“Needed Me”

88

This year, a photo of Rihanna made the rounds in which she’s wearing super pointy heels, a giant coral jacket that might as well be a sleeping bag, and a T-shirt that reads “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE.” It’s unclear if she’s wearing pants. Seems like a safe bet that’s what she was wearing when she recorded “Needed Me.” Has Rihanna ever delivered a more apt lyric than, “Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage?/Fuck ya white horse and ya carriage”? “Needed Me” may be a steady 110 BPM, but it slinks along like she recorded it in a steam room. Producer DJ Mustard borrows from the UK house tradition of the disembodied voice, and all the cut-up vocals echo like ghosts of the men Rihanna swallowed whole. –Matthew Schnipper

“In Common”

87

If you follow Alicia Keys on Instagram, you already know she’s drawn to Nigerian pop acts like Wizkid and Davido, part of the ascendant Afrobeats sound. Part UK funky, part soca, part dancehall, part soda pop bubble, this Nigerian/Ghanaian hybrid became the sound of the year, so it made sense that Ms. Keys and producer Illangelo wove those vibrant tropical patterns into “In Common.” It’s a rare, welcome instance of Keys moving out of her musical comfort zone and riding the humid groove, and she took it all the way to the DNC stage. It would have been easy enough to pair that genre’s bubbling rhythm with a lyrical bauble, but Keys instead twists the love song trope of “opposites attract.” “If you could love somebody like me/You must be messed up too” simultaneously indicts and embraces the dysfunction, insecurity, and maddening laws of attraction that undergird modern love. –Andy Beta

“Sunday Love”

86

Bat for Lashes’ The Bride is a concept album about a woman left stranded at the altar when her fiancé is killed in a car crash en route to their wedding. Overdramatic? Yes. Heavy-handed? Sure. But Natasha Khan has always excelled at sweeping up the listener in grand tides of feeling, and the widowed bride’s emotional rollercoaster ride proves to be an ideal vessel for her songs.

“Sunday Love” takes place after the bride has raced out of the church, jumped behind the wheel of her car, and sped away to embark on a grief-stricken solo honeymoon. The track’s nervous, pulsing rhythm mimics the paranoia of the lyrics (“I see her in every place I go,” “She's in my bedroom/Now I can't fight”), contrasting with Khan’s lilting vocals and harp melody to conjure a swirling descent into madness.The Bride ends with redemption through self-love, but no story earns its happy ending without a fight. “Sunday Love” is the bottom the bride must hit in order to begin her crawl upwards towards the light. –Amy Phillips

“Sister”

85

“The thing about getting older is that instead of deciding that you’ve figured it out, you get better at realizing you never will,” Angel Olsentold Pitchfork earlier this year. Olsen reaches a similar conclusion at the end of the ambling journey she takes on “Sister,” the Crazy Horse-flecked centerpiece of her third album, My Woman. “All my life I thought had changed,” she pleads again and again throughout the last half, before an eruption of a solo from guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. Though some may think Olsen is singing about her actual sibling, her inward reflection suggests that the sister is within, the parts of herself that she’s learned to love over time. Like many existential struggles, these are hard-earned realizations, not eureka moments—a fact that’s echoed by the song’s pacing and its video’s loose plotline. Few singer-songwriters could sustain an introspective slow-burn the way Olsen does here, but then again, few singer-songwriters have the lyrical skill and vocal range that she does, either. –Jillian Mapes

“Give Violence a Chance”

84

One of the most puzzling reactions to Donald Trump’s election within the music community has been, “Well, at least there’ll be some good punk rock in the next four years.” As if life in America up until this point hadn’t already been vitriolic fodder for anyone on the outskirts—as if punk had always been the realm of straight, white men, sequestered in suburbia, who apparently needed the threat of an orange boogeyman to bang out a record. In reality, this is merely the moment where the true 21st century punks—the black kids, the queer, the transgendered, the anarchists—are put to an even more arduous task than before. “Give Violence a Chance” by G.L.O.S.S. (which stands for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”) may just serve as one of their anthems, a two-minute call-to-arms to cut the kumbaya and start bashing back. Spewed across a booming buzzsaw riff, frontwoman Sadie Switchblade screams with a rage so potent, you could slice through it with a rusty boxcutter. “When peace is just another word for death/It’s our turn to give violence a chance,” she yells, giving life to a scary realization the vulnerable can face when confronted with hate: You better get them before they get you. –Cameron Cook

“Promises of Fertility”

83

Huerco S.once described listening to ambient music as a means of coping with anxiety while traveling; he noted, too, that his own most recent LP, For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also ThoseWho Have), had a similar calming effect on him. “Promises of Fertility” is the most distilled example of this, a track that stretches and softens the atmospherics that colored in the grainy house music of his earlier work. It’s comprised of a glistening melody that wanders above tape hiss—vaguely reminiscent of hold music, but decelerated to the point that time seems to disintegrate. The track begins and ends in the middle of a note as if, for seven minutes, Huerco is tuning us into a radio frequency that will transmit this loop forever. It’s dreamy but neutral in its expression and, in turn, utterly narcotic. –Thea Ballard

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Republic

Ariana Grande

“Into You”

82

For a little while last year, Ariana Grande seemed close to a Bieber/Britney-esque freefall. After the whole donut-licking scandal, the flop of intended comeback single “Focus,” and her breakup with Big Sean, the familiar narrative of child star-turned-sexpot-turned-trainwreck appeared to be playing itself out again. But the release of the mature, self-assured Dangerous Woman, and the various hits it spawned, ended up crushing haters’ doubts under the spike of Ariana's high-heeled go-go boot.

“Into You” has haunted pop radio for the past several months, as songs produced by Max Martin tend to do. A throbbing, slow-burning come-on, “Into You” captures the thrill of the moment just before an illicit kiss, when the will-they-or-won’t-they tension becomes almost unbearable. “A little less conversation and a little more touch my body,” she demands, channeling Elvis and Mariah Carey, the progenitor of Grande’s particular strain of vocal bombast. And now we know: Ariana Grande is not going away any time soon. –Amy Phillips

“Golden Chords”

81

There’s a beautiful irony in Deakin’s “Golden Chords.” The album it comes from, Sleep Cycle, was born from a controversial Kickstarter project long delayed due to Josh Dibb’s creative doubts and “fatal perfectionism.” That delay upset many, but the final music was worth it—not despite the struggle, but because of it. “Golden Chords” is an honest meditation on uncertainty and self-esteem, an attempt to escape artistic paralysis by, as the Animal Collective co-founder sings, “shak[ing] these broken chords till they turn gold.”

Dibb gives himself this pep talk using soft acoustic guitar strums, subdued percussion loops, and a whispery falsetto. He opens the song so confused about how to combat his creative funk that every solution feels wrong. Yet small stabs at positivity build up until Dibb sounds nearly restored: “In time/You’ll revive what you thought dead … Stop believing your being’s beenshattered and distorted/’Cause, brother, you’re so full of love.” That he’s right makes “Golden Chords” a meta-victory: a song about how strife can lead to triumph that proves its own point. –Marc Masters